Correction Officer Says Hayes Admitted Killing Hawke-Petit

Testimony In Case Ends

Final Arguments Expected Later This Week

September 29, 2010|By ALAINE GRIFFIN, agriffin@courant.com

UPDATE

A hearing scheduled in the trial of Steven Hayes scheduled for 2 p.m. Wednesday has been postponed until Thursday.

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NEW HAVEN — Eight days of wrenching testimony that moved jurors to tears and drove victims' loved ones from the courtroom ended Tuesday, setting the stage for closing arguments Friday in the trial of Steven Hayes.

Tuesday was yet another dramatic day in the widely publicized Superior Court trial of Hayes, 47, who faces execution if convicted of the slayings of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters, Hayley and Michaela, during a July 23, 2007, home invasion and arson at the family's Cheshire home.

Prosecutors, with testimony from a fire investigator, took jurors inside the Petit home as a fire — fueled by a substance "consistent with gasoline" — raged from one floor to the next inside the two-story colonial.

Tuesday's evidence also brought jurors to the prison where Hayes was being held on July 5, 2008, the day that the prosecution said

he confessed to parts of the crime within earshot of Jeremiah Krob, a correction officer at the Northern Correctional Institution in Somers, a super-maximum-security prison.

Hayes admitted killing Hawke-Petit, Krob testified. Hayes told another inmate that he poured gasoline on stairs inside the home but did not light the match that he said ignited the blaze. Hayes also insinuated to the inmate that the lone survivor of the break-in and attack, Dr. William Petit Jr., Hawke-Petit's husband and the girls' father, was in on the crime to collect an insurance payout, Krob said.

After 26 state witnesses, defense attorneys used testimony from just two witnesses: a Cheshire police officer who testified about seeing large amounts of smoke in the house and an investigator with the public defender's office. Thomas J. Ullmann, an attorney for Hayes, also read into evidence a simple statement that Hayes' mother gave to police after the killings. In it, Diana Hayes said her son told her that he was going to meet a girl on the night of July 22. She last saw her son at 10 p.m., the statement said. Hayes' mother died last summer.

Jailhouse Conversation

Tuesday was not the first time that Krob was on the witness stand. In July, Krob was there without a jury present as defense attorneys unsuccessfully argued to suppress the statements that Hayes made to his fellow inmate.

On Tuesday, the jury listened intently as Krob talked for the first time publicly about the conversation. At the time, he was on a suicide watch of Hayes, requiring him to log Hayes' movements every 15 minutes and sit just a few feet away from his cell.

Talking through the door cracks between prison Cell 223 and Cell 224, Hayes and another inmate, Vernon Cowan, discussed whether a state police helicopter followed their transport vans to and from court on days when the men were scheduled to appear.

And then the conversation turned to murder.

Krob said that Hayes admitted to pouring gasoline on the stairs of the home but denied lighting the match. He pinned much of the crime on Joshua Komisarjevsky, the other man facing the death penalty in the slayings of the Petits. Komisarjevsky's trial is scheduled for next year.

Hayes also told Cowan that Komisarjevsky sexually assaulted Michaela Petit and poured gasoline on her. Hayes told Cowan that Komisarjevsky took cellphone photos of Michaela during the crime and tried to e-mail them to his friends, Krob said.

For his part, Hayes said he brought Hawke-Petit to the bank to get her to withdraw $40,000, Krob said. Hayes told Cowan that he wasn't sure why he didn't just leave with the money and, instead, went back to the home, Krob said.

On his return, Hayes said, Komisarjevsky told him he "needed to kill" Hawke-Petit, to "get rid of her," Krob said.

"Hayes said he didn't know if he could do it," Krob testified.

At that point, they saw police cruisers outside and Hayes told Cowan that Hawke-Petit was killed.

"He killed Mrs. Petit," Krob said.

"Who is he?" prosecutor Gary Nicholson asked.

"Hayes," Krob said

Hayes told Cowan that he did not sexually assault anyone, Krob said. That testimony contradicts what Ullmann said in his opening statements in the trial. Ullmann told jurors that Hayes had, in fact, raped and strangled Hawke-Petit.

Krob said that Cowan asked Hayes if he thought Petit was in on the crime to cash in on a lucrative insurance payout.

Hayes said he considered it because Hayes said he tied up Petit very well in the basement and could not understand how he could have broken loose. He said he thought that Komisarjevsky might have "loosened up the knots" that Petit was tied with.

Outside the courthouse, after court had ended for the day, a tired-looking Petit said: "Jennifer, Hayley and Michaela were the most important people in my life. I really can't dignify that insinuation with a response."

The Rev. Richard Hawke, Hawke-Petit's father, called the notion "insensitive, cruel and out of place."